


history doesn't repeat (but it does rhyme)

by procellous



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (but they are alive never fear), Adoption, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Jon Snow is Not a Targaryen, Jon Snow is a Stark, Past Rape/Non-con, R Plus L Equals J, this is another one where Theon and Sansa are Lord and Lady Not-Appearing-In-This-Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 12:44:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20639387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procellous/pseuds/procellous
Summary: Jon's niece has some questions about her father. Luckily, Jon has some answers.





	history doesn't repeat (but it does rhyme)

**Author's Note:**

> Me: hey, what if I made the Sansa-Lyanna parallels even _more_ explicit
> 
> Happy Day 3, I didn't kill anyone this time.

“Uncle Jon? Does Father hate me?”

Jon glanced up from the letter he was writing. Robbyn stood in the doorway of his solar, her eyes shining with unshed tears. 

He bit back his first instinct to simply assure her that her father loved her; it was true, but not really helpful. No, he remembered this conversation: his father gently explaining what a half-brother was, and why Lady Catelyn wasn’t his mother. 

He set down his quill and put the half-written letter aside, shifting over in his chair and beckoning her to sit next to him. Her slight frame fit neatly in the gap between Jon’s side and the arm of the chair, and made it easy to wrap a comforting arm around his niece. 

“What makes you think he hates you?”

She looked down, kicking her legs back and forth. He let her be, and finally she said, “Sometimes he looks at me like…like he doesn’t see me. Like he’s seeing someone else.” Her voice was very small as she added: “Someone he doesn’t like very much.”

Jon froze. It was true that Robbyn resembled Sansa, and people usually took her dark hair as inherited from Theon, or from the dark-haired Stark look, but there were still traces—and if anyone could see them, it would be Theon. Theon, who had to have known that monster’s every mood and whim; Theon, who could never forget that face…

Had his father ever watched him like that, wondering if Jon would take after the man who sired him, a man who only existed in his life as a curse on the wind? If his tainted blood would betray him, in the end?

“Do you remember when your mother told you about the war?” It had been in hesitant, halting sentences, and had skipped over most of it—none of them had wanted to talk about it, all the ways they had failed, and so much of it was completely unsuitable for the innocent little girl sitting next to him. “And how your father was hurt?”

“And I’m not supposed to touch his scars unless he says I can, because they still hurt.”

“That’s right. Your father has some…ghosts, that follow him around.” That would be the best way to explain the guilt, the half-madness of battle-sickness that still lingered. 

It had been like plunging into ice water when Theon, feverish with infection after taking a crossbow bolt aimed for Sansa, had begged Jon for death. _Take my head, please, Robb, just do it. While there’s still enough of me left to die, let me die as myself, please…_

“Sometimes,” he continued, forcing the memory away, “when he looks at people, he sees ghosts instead. He doesn’t hate you at all, I promise. He loves you.”

“But I heard some people talking, in the town, and they said…”

He didn’t need to hear what they said; he could guess. The gossip hadn’t changed since he was a child, not really. 

“Who’s Ramsay Bolton?”

Jon sighed. They had tried to blot his name from history, but they couldn’t blot him out of people’s minds. 

“He was a very wicked man, who hurt your parents and killed your Uncle Rickon. He was executed for his crimes so that he couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.” Sansa and Theon had stopped him from beating Ramsay to death, but not for mercy; they had the higher claim to his life. He never asked them what it was they had done when they reappeared—Theon ashen and trembling, Sansa pale and expressionless as marble—and they had never said a word about it. Only that it was done. 

“But I’m not his child, right? Father’s my father, I _told_ them that, but they just said that I don’t look like him and that I’m a bastard.”

“Your mother doesn’t look much like her father did, but that doesn’t make her any less her daughter. As for you being a bastard, it’s true that you were born a bastard, but you were legitimized a Stark as I was, and you’ve nothing at all to be ashamed of. You’re a Stark of Winterfell. Nothing can take that from you.”

She leaned against him, her head resting heavy on his arm. He was still sometimes surprised that Robbyn wasn’t a babe anymore, born squalling and screaming in the middle of an ice storm at the Wall while Sansa wavered between life and death. 

_Promise me, Jon…_

Someday she would learn some of what they had done during the war; someday she would learn that the reclamation of Winterfell wasn’t as noble as they all wanted to believe it was. Someday she would learn about the blood that was shed that ensure her childhood was full of love and light, and she wouldn’t be their little girl anymore. 

“Do you remember how Robert’s Rebellion started?”

“Rhaegar Targaryen abducted Lyanna Stark,” she said, reciting the lesson, “and when her father Rickard and her brother Brandon rode south to demand her return, the Mad King killed them both, so Grandfather called the banners. And Robert Baratheon joined him, because he was betrothed to Lyanna, and they won and crowned Robert king.”

“That’s right, but there’s another part to the story. A secret part.” He could count on one hand the number of people still alive who knew the truth of it, a number about to go up by one. “Rhaegar Targaryen got a son on Lyanna, and when your grandfather came to rescue her, he found her and her child. She made him promise, before she died, to protect her son. So when he rode back to Winterfell, after the war was over, he took the boy with him and raised him as his bastard son, and never told anyone who the boy’s mother was.”

“That was you, right? Lyanna’s son?”

“Yes, it was. But even though Rhaegar Targaryen was my father in blood, my true father is Eddard Stark, because he’s the one who raised me and loved me, and it was his name I took when I was legitimized.”

She kicked her feet for a while, watching them swing. Theon liked to say that she got her brooding from Jon, which was probably fair. She certainly hadn’t gotten it from Sansa. 

“If…” she began. “If my blood-father was so wicked, why did they keep me?”

“Sometimes, when a man and a woman love each other very much, they decide to keep the baby that an evil man got on her, and they promise to raise that child as their own.”

“But what if I hurt people too? I don’t want to hurt anyone, I don’t want to be evil…”

“Am_ I_ evil?” Jon asked. She shook her head so violently that her braids swung around and hit her in the face. “But my blood-father was, wasn’t he? He carried off a girl half his age when he was already married, and fought her family to keep her away from them.”

“But _you’re_ a good person. You help people. You’d never do anything like that.”

“Good and evil aren’t things that are in our blood. They’re things we do, choices we make. It doesn’t matter who your blood-father was. Your true father is Theon Greyjoy, and he’s one of the best men I’ve ever known. Your mother is the best woman I know. You’re not tainted, I promise. You’re not doomed to be evil.”

She curled up against his side. “Thank you, Uncle Jon.”

“Anything for my favorite niece.”

“I’m your _only_ niece.”

“So your position is safe.” He kissed the top of her head. The worry, he knew, would never quite vanish entirely—but it would ease. Robbyn Stark had no reason to fear her blood. 

**Author's Note:**

> Jon is Best Uncle. 
> 
> (Also, fuck Rhaegar Targaryen.)


End file.
